[ale] mass email for school and school web site

[Kenneth Price]

On Tue, Jun 2, 2009 at 2:38 PM, Brandon Colbert
<colbert.brandon at gmail.com>wrote:

> I have a client using Pommo. They send out to a list of 120,000 twice a
> week, and it seems to work fine. The only problem is bounce methods. You
> have to script your own bounce method. Other than that it works great.
>
>
While this sounds easy enough, if you don't want to manage your own server
then go with a third party like constant contact - regardless of their
flaws.  You'll run into delivery headaches that aren't worth the effort for
a mere 1000 recipients.

We do a monthly mailing to over 300,000 recipients using a custom mailer.
Remember, you have to manage the contact list, have an interface to create
the document, and send the mailing to a mail server - of which Postfix works
great, better than Qmail in my experience, but that's just me.  Oh, and
don't think that you'll be able to get even a third of the mailing
successfully delivered using mail().  Too many email servers now do
call-backs to the originating server, plus a miriad of other anti-spam
checks which will require a full set of headers not provided by mail().
You'll need a fully configured MTA for this to work right.

Then you'll have to provide a method for auto-unsubscribing the bounce
backs, or providers like Hotmail or AOL will block you.  You also need to
provide a one-click method for recipients to unsubscribe to the mailings.

While I understand 1000 is a far cry from 300,000, it's still a pain either
way.  While not technically impossible, not worth the effort IMHO.

My 2 cents.
-Ken
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mail.ale.org/pipermail/ale/attachments/20090602/31cc651e/attachment-0001.html